The performances alternated with master classes and roundtables, the critics discussed what they had just seen, and the main events were happening in the auditorium of the Mogilev Drama Theater. It was the sixth time Andrei Novikov organized the International Youth Theater Forum in Belarus. Eight countries — Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Germany and Bulgaria — presented 15 plays at “M.@rtcontact-2011.” The performances demonstrated the various aspects of modern theater in all its forms (traditional, classical, and experimental approaches to development, serious studies in plastique and choreography, and examples of rethinking psychological theater).
The drama palette was interesting. From the famed The Pokrovsky Gate by Leonid Zorin (Novgorod Dostoevsky Drama Theater), to the cruel modern reality of Killer by the new drama representative Alexandr Molchanov (Theater.doc in Moscow); from the highly artistic text by Eric Emmanuel Schmitt, in his exquisite Libertine (Kyiv New Drama Theater in Pechersk), to the startling revelation of Philip Roth in Portnoy’s Complaint (Teatr Konsekwentny in Warsaw). For example, the play How to Become Famous by Olga Isaeva from the Riga Theater “Observatoriya” took the audience back to the Soviet times and the play the Office by Ingrid Lausund from the Yanka Kupala National Drama Theater (Belarus) spoke about the hardships of everyday life in western societies.
Talented studies of modern choreography were presented in the ballet Flies at the Sun by the Modern Choreography Theater D.O.Z.S.K.I. (Belarus). It is a conglomerate of several choreography schools, types of modern dance and choreography genres. This theater amazed the audience with the originality of its scenic language, and the courageous realization of its own plastique searches. This art gives one an esthetic pleasure from looking at the beautiful bodies, the exquisite and sophisticated poses, and from the understanding that all of them interacted in creating the whole picture.
The play Idiot. The Return, based on Dostoevsky’s short story and staged by the St. Petersburg Theater Studio was an example of successfully transposing a classic. The feeling of modernity permeated the whole performance with clear form and eclectic content. The plot of the chapters begins at the moment when Myshkin captures the photo of Nastasya. Each act was played slowly and “colored” differently, with white and black decorations, costumes, and the scene space broken by the curtains. The mise-en-scene was in the foreground, the middle, and the background, making the action more dynamic and giving the story a three-dimensional feeling. The small world of the St. Petersburg society is seen through the eyes of a sick person, Myshkin, but his understanding of the essence of things seems much more sober than that of the people who are supposedly healthy. The play is built on the triangular principle. Each act is dedicated to the main characters Nastasya, Myshkin and Rogozhin. The action culminates in a scene in which the three participants of this love triangle form the geometric analog. The heroes are facing each other under the projector, they are extremely tense, they understand the desperate situation and the impossibility of a solution to it, but still they feel the burning need for happiness and love.
The artistic and emotional peak of “M.@rtcontact-2011” was the cult play by the Yekaterinburg Kolyada-Theater The Inspector General based on Mykola Hohol’s play. The director Nikolai Kolyada created an absolute grotesque based on the famed play. What is this officials’ community, what is the time and the place where Khlestakov found himself? This is a Russia of all times… Kolyada built his associative and metaphorical realism with the help of… mud — as an image, as an indispensable and typical trait of Russian life. The mud rules everything! The real mud was on the stage, the soil where one can sow something and trample it down, one can get covered with the mud or throw it. In this complicated construction of meaning the text is especially piercing in the sharp circumstances. The characters change their articulation and the usual pronunciation of words, the image is sophisticated and unexpected for the familiar characters. The polysemantic metaphors reveal the crazy phantasmagoria of life, past and especially present, since the allusions and references to modern life are more than evident. The director created a document of the era’s artistic discovery… Khlestakov (Oleg Yagodin) tells about urban life with passion and is lying naked in the mud. There are several emotional climaxes in the play; one of the strongest ones is a scene in which the mayor’s wife and daughter are being seduced. Both are wearing white, nearly wedding dresses, and Khlestakov sullies them with special cynicism… Seeing this the mayor didn’t protect his women… However, there’s so much pain in his eyes, his body in the mud is cramped with pain… The Inspector General is both funny and scary. Hohol depicted a timeless picture of the filth of life! Unfortunately, the mud doesn’t disappear with time.
